When it comes to economy, the oft-repeated mantra to the Third World is to liberalize their economies as a 'requirement' for development. Looking at the international development that has taken place in the last three decades, we mostly see the domination of capitalism. It has completely monopolized economic development and enforced its model of development upon the world. The IMF and World Bank have spread their capitalist-oriented ideas like a tsunami. These monetary institutions claim that industrialization, hand in hand with the diffusion of liberal economic ideas would positively transform the traditional economies. It has been argued that these influences would place poor countries on a path to development similar to the one taken by the western industrialized nations during the Industrial Revolution. The models presented to fortify this stance are the 'Asian Tiger' economies- China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. These countries are held as examples of the successful nations who adopted economic liberalism and progressed. However, the reality stands in sheer contradiction to this assertion. Today poverty is the state the majority of the world's people live in. Three billion people in the world live on fewer than two dollars a day; another 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Moreover 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation and 2 billion have no access to electricity. It is clear that the liberal economics is behind the wealth disparities that beset majority of the world's people. -SHARIQUE NAEEM, Lahore, via e-mail, June 28.